You can bring one restaurant and bring it to your town

Chimes to Lafayette, La

Mowata Store or any one of those good coonass specialty meat places...

Any restaurant in .new Orleans..to baton rouge

Cuban Pete's in Montclair NJ to my back yard.

Oh, this is too hard. My first inclination is to pick a really good thai restaurant, but then I think of someplace like Bar Tartine ( https://www.bartartine.com/ ) in San Francisco: I'd get great food and really, truly excellent bread.

But I'm gonna go with Balthazar in NYC: good bakery, serves three meals a day, and classic food I'd want to eat all the time. I could get a decent croissant & a nice cafe au lait for breakfast, a frisee aux lardons salad at lunch, and steak frites late at night. Read the menus and weep that it's not around the corner: LINK

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Balthazar in NYC

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sat next to Sienna Miller there once

that neighborhood is full of cool spots. used to work on Grand St. and had lunch at all around there. Ed's Lobster Bar, Mexican Radio, La Esquina, Cafe El Portal, SoHo Park. La Colombe for coffee


as per the OP, my serious answer would be Epsilon in Monterey, CA. Used to go here at least once a week when I lived in Cali. best Greek food I've ever had.

That sangria and bacon wrapped dates doe.

Charcoal's to Shreveport


eta: my srs answer, I'm with OBRAH…give us a good Mexican spot…how about a El Tiempo Cantina from Houston

My choice would be a restaurant that might raise consciousness and inspire a whole new scene here in New Orleans.

So I would pick Rick Bayless's first restaurant, still going strong in Chicago: Frontera Grill.

Frontera's scope is ambitious enough to reveal greatness at every level of Mexican cuisine, from fine-dining to street food.

Within a few weeks of Frontera opening here, after New Orleans got a taste of what Mexican food actually tastes like, every place that thinks it currently offers Mexican food would be deserted and forced to close. But, in their wake, a new generation of Mexican restauranteurs, both high and humble, would arise.

BTW I don't know of a restaurant even in, say, Mexico City that offers both amazing fine-dining and also amazing tacos and other antojitos. So that's why I picked a Mexican restaurant in Chicago. Frontera Grill covers every level of that gamut superbly.

As a bonus, I think Frontera Grill is also the most affordable restaurant ever to win the James Beard award for Most Oustanding Restaurant in America (as it did back in 2007).